Collecting rock memorabilia is an increasingly expensive business. A fortnight ago, Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyrics for Like A Rolling Stone were snapped up at auction by an anonymous bidder for a cool $2.045m. A guitar played by George Harrison on Ready Steady Go! and the recording of I Wanna Hold Your Hand recently went for £390,000. A tuft of Elvis’s hair fetched $115,000 in 2002. One of John Lennon’s teeth? £19,500. Even Elton John’s old toaster fetched £780.

On the one hand, you can see the appeal of such ephemera. Everyone needs a prized possession they can show off if the post-pub gaggle ever ends up back at their place. We’ve all collected similar gewgaws at some point: keepsakes from gigs, mementos from a favourite band, or a limited-edition gatefold of an album specifically created to extract money from the kind of people who buy limited-edition gatefolds.

But you can’t insert yourself into the story of a rock legend, however much you spend. At the end of the day, Sotheby’s prize Dylan lot was just four pages of paper from the Roger Smith Hotel in Washington DC with some words scribbled on them by a folk singer. The passion and urgency that inspired them is long gone, and was never for sale in the first place.

It’s an odd condition of the music dullard, this obsession with hoarding loot for a collectors’ cock-waggling contest, showing off Eric Clapton’s old pyjamas behind a glass case as if they’re the Turin shroud. It’s the lot of those same bores who’ll hark on that everything was better in the old days, that pop peaked in the 70s, and there’s been nothing worth bothering with since.

What if these people, instead of tiling their bathrooms with Jimi Hendrix’s old plectrums, really invested in music? Imagine what they could do with $2m. They could fund a record label; put on a mini-festival; support small venues and promote hundreds of gigs; or donate to oodles of Kickstarter projects for the hundreds of great bands trying to scratch a living out of making music. “There’s not been anyone like Dylan in the last 50 years,” they’ll grumble. They’re wrong, of course, but then the next Bob Dylan is probably working in a soulless office job somewhere with a thousand great songs stuck inside their head, only they don’t have the time, money or equipment to help people hear them.

Of course, if you’re lucky enough to have money, you’re free to fritter it away on whatever you choose. But just think: rather than worshipping the old gods, you could help make the new ones. You could create a new legacy rather than preserve an old legend. And you could write your own chapter in music’s history book, rather than just buying someone else’s used pages.